—Angelique Devaux, French Licensed Attorney (Notaire), LL.M. in American Law (Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law) To marry or tax me. This could be the modern Shakespeare quote heard in the oral arguments last March 27th at the US Supreme Court in the pending case Windsor v. United States. But it is more about a

—Eoin Carolan, University College Dublin Ireland’s Constitutional Convention has voted overwhelmingly in favour of a proposal to amend the Irish Constitution to allow for civil marriage for same-sex couples. 79 Convention members favoured the proposal with 19 against and 1 expressing no opinion. There was also a similarly large majority in favour of a directive

–Tokujin Matsudaira, Kanagawa University Faculty of Law Recently the Asahi Shimbun Weekly (ASW, a special Monday edition of Asahi News) interviewed eight constitutional scholars and asked them to answer a survey about the possible amendment of Japan’s postwar constitution. The results appeared in ASW on April 8 (in Japanese). The eight scholars are Yasuo Hasebe

—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School Judges on national courts of last resort are generally appointed in politicized processes. Judicial selection is politicized when the choice rests on popular consent mediated in some way through elected representatives. We can identify four major models of politicized judicial selection in constitutional states: (1) executive unilateral appointment; (2)

–Russell Miller, Washington & Lee University School of Law, Co-Author, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (2012), Co-Editor-in-Chief, German Law Journal As a comparative lawyer it is tempting to see a once-in-a-generation convergence of American and German constitutional law on what many regard as the era’s foremost civil rights issue: same-sex marriage.

–Gábor Halmai, Professor of Law, Eötvös Lóránd University (Budapest) and Visiting Research Scholar, Princeton University Last month, on March 11, the Hungarian Parliament voted on the fourth amendment to the the country’s 2011 constitution which has moved many statutory provision into the constitution despite Constitutional Court rulings striking them down and the European Union, the

[Editor’s Note: In this installment of I•CONnect’s Book Review/Response Series, Markus Thiel reviews Claudia Haupt’s recently-published book Religion-State Relations in the United States and Germany: The Quest for Neutrality. Claudia Haupt then responds to Markus Thiel’s review.] —Markus Thiel, Professor of Public Law, University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration North Rhine-Westphalia, Cologne, and Associate

–Alvin Y. H. Cheung, Barrister-at-Law, Sir Oswald Cheung’s Chambers, Hong Kong In the Vallejos Evangeline Banao v Commissioner of Registration & Another judgment handed down on 25 March 2013,[1] the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal (“CFA”) held that, on a proper construction of article 24(2)(4) of the Basic Law, the constitutional document of the Hong

—Rehan Abeyratne, Jindal Global Law School In a forthcoming article, I examine socioeconomic rights in the Indian Constitution and the increasingly central role the Supreme Court plays in their enforcement. As Nilesh Sinha recently noted on this blog, India’s judicial independence has allowed the Court to secure broad socioeconomic justice, despite allegations of corruption and

—Eoin Carolan, University College Dublin With some time to pass before the US Supreme Court delivers its keenly-watched ruling in U.S. v. Windsor, arguments about constitutional rights and same-sex marriage are due to receive another outing this weekend as part of Ireland’s ongoing Constitutional Convention. The Convention was established in partial response to public demands for

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